The Best Way to Fix Healthcare.gov: Shut It Down

                The rollout of Healthcare.gov has been a disaster by all accounts – this is a truth that no one is disputing right now. The site has been plagued by crashes, slowness and security issues. Numerous on-air demonstrations of the site have attested to its unreliability. Perhaps most embarrassingly, the site was shown to be down during a congressional hearing at which the Secretary of Health and Human Services was testifying. The recent release of enrollment figures for October – universally denounced as paltry numbers – only confirms that the site as it is currently constructed is not workable. The question now is what do we do about it? The approach that the Obama Administration is taking is to bring in numerous leading experts to help fix the site, and key advisors have been assigned to oversee repairs. The site is being taken offline every day from 1AM to 5AM so that fixes can be carried out. But what is essentially going on is that the administration is trying to fix the site while it runs. Members of Congress have suggested taking down the website completely for a period of several weeks so that the website can be fixed, but the administration says it has been advised by both inside and outside experts that doing so would not lead to any significant gains.
                Now this is interesting. Recently signs have started to emerge that the administration fears it will not complete repairs to the site by its self-imposed deadline of the end of this month. If the administration misses this deadline its credibility will be further eroded to the point that if a subsequent deadline is offered, no one will believe it. It is also worth mentioning that the longer this drags on, the more likely it will be that Americans might not be able to sign up for insurance plans by the end-of-March deadline, and it will be all-but-certain that Americans will not be able to sign up by December 15^th, which is the last day you can sign up and still have your plan take effect by January 1^st. Clearly, there will be both economic and political risks if the administration fails to meet the November 30^th deadline for fixing the site.
                Now let us think about what would happen if the site were to be taken offline completely between now and November 30^th. That would provide the administration with half-a-month of uninterrupted time to fix the site. Currently the brunt of the repair work is being done in four-hour blocks every morning while much of America is asleep. But imagine how much could be accomplished if the administration had 15 days of uninterrupted time to work at it. Although taking this approach might not guarantee that repairs will be complete by the end of November, it is possible that doing so would allow for enough repairs to make the site decently usable, which it is currently far from. This would hopefully allow for millions of Americans to sign up for health insurance, and the administration might just be able to retain even an ounce of the credibility that it has left (if there is any left) when it comes to enforcing Obamacare.
                There is no perfect solution to fixing Healthcare.gov, not when it was rolled out even though numerous flaws had been well-documented by those working on the site. The fact of the matter is it never should have been rolled out in the state it was in on October 1^st, but it did go out and now the administration has to make it workable so that it can fulfill its intended purpose. My feeling is that repairs would go much more smoothly if the site was taken down for even two weeks so that work could be done. I am confident that even that small amount of time would be enough to make the site actually usable. There is only one way to go about this that is the right way, and that way is to shut the website down.